Uwe Stöhr wrote: > What frustrates me is that the LyX developers deny to work also for lyX > on Windows.
Sorry, I do not understand how you got that impression. Over the past years you've got a lot of windows-specific help from several developers, most notably Vincent, Peter and Enrico. Peter also mentioned some time ago that he wants to include the windows dependencies in the LyX sources (like boost), to ease compilation with MSVC. Just during the last days Kornel and I tried hard to get you going with the new MSVC version. I even postponed the language nesting bug fixes (which are IMHO important for LyX 2.2.0 on all platforms) because of that. This was a lot of work for LyX on Windows, so it does not look exactly like we deny to work for the windows version of LyX, does it? > To me it appears that people denies Windows only for > ideological reasons and that doesn't make sense to me. We have to face > reality - if the vast majority out there use Windows, well, then we have > to provide LyX for this OS. Everybody agrees that LyX should be available on Windows. But this does not mean that every LyX developer needs to develop on windows. My personal reason for not using Windows is simply that I don't have an IT department at home that takes care of the virus scanner, decides which windows updates have to be installed and which ones are dangerous etc etc. BTW, the Windows patches of the patchday today contain one patch that breaks outlook, and which has been retracted again (KB3114409). This happens regularly with windows patches. It does not happen with my linux distro, the quality of the security fixes is much higher there. The work I do for LyX I do for fun. Setting up and administering Windows is not fun, and not my strength either. Therefore I use the environment that lets me concentrate on LyX itself and needs zero additional effort. > Besides this, if I stop right now then there won't be a LyX 2.2 for > Windows I assume. But development continues and if anybody wants to > restart LyX for Windows in a few months, e.g. CMake won't be in the > state to compile on Windows. I remember also a lot of compilation errors > I encountered because MSVC is a strict compiler and doesn't allow some > things. So a new developer would have much troubles and most probably > stop before he really begun. I bet that 2.2.0 will be released also for Windows, whether you stop or not. Either some new face pops out of the dark as Pavel suggested, or we'll cross-compile with mingw (and possibly provide a much more basic installer). BTW, not long ago somebody was interested to compile LyX with newer MSVC 2013, maybe it would be a good idea to serach the list archives and get in touch with him? > However maybe I will quit LyX after 2.2.0 is released. In the world > around me nobody is using Linux nor do I know a single person who is > allowed to use another OS than MacOS and Windows at his work. In all > collaborations I was/am working MS Word is the requirement. So in fact I > don't need LyX. I would like to use it but are not allowed to. (I know > that universities are an exception but also in my former institute it > was a hard fight to get the permission to use LyX e.g. for my thesis.) > So yes, sometimes I wonder why I spend my spare time with a program that > I cannot use in real life. If it is too frustrating for you then it might indeed be wise to stop LyX develoment. In the long term it does not help anybody if one developer is continously frustrated and only keeps developing because he feels some kind of duty. I also believe that this would not kill the windows version of LyX. There might be some rough ends here or there, but LyX on windows will survive also without you. There is however one area that would suffer a lot if you were to stop _all_ LyX related work: Documentation. I do not see that anybody would step up and continue your documentation work with the same quality, so it would degrade rather quickly. Therefore, if I'd be allowed one wish, then it would be this: Stop developing the windows version or LyX or not, as you feel most comfortable, but please do not stop to work on the documentation. Georg
